Sony Vaio can't downgrade from W8 to W7

Hello,

I purchased a sony vaio laptop that came with windows 8 and of course no recovery discs. While I asked the salesman if I can downgrade with a simple format he said of course but that was very untrue. Here is my issue. The laptop's hard drive has EFI partition system but the bootable windows 7 cd would only install on MBR hard drive. I used gparted and converted my hard drive to MBR. But this is what I should have been warned about. This procedure erases all the partitions on the hard drive, including the vaio recovery partition which contained Windows 8 and the hardware drivers. I installed windows 7 and booted them but most of the hardware devices like wifi, card readers etc. wouldn't work (listed with a yellow exclamation mark in the device manager.). I tried downloading the sony drivers for my model from the website but they didn't seem to work. Then a message from a utility that runs hardware checks on vaio started to run (apparently from one of the drivers I installed from the support site) that told me that the battery was not connected properly and that the system would hibernate so I could re-insert the battery. That message never got away. I don't want to purchase the recovery dvds from sony. Any ideas on how I can make windows 7 stable and properly working without dealing issues? Thank you.